Lit Literatures
Unidentical Identity
“The sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the U.S. left and U.S. feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition—affinity, not identity. … I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
—Haraway, D. (2018). A Manifesto for Cyborgs. In V. Leitch et al. (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd ed., p. 2050; 2056). W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 
“Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities!”
—Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. (2018). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In V. Leitch et al. (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd ed., p. 1382). W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 
Preposterous Popular Perceptions
“The popular perception of ‘the good war’ as a crisis that brought Canadians together in a common struggle under the federal government’s leadership does not fully recognize the nuanced experiences of smaller communities. At the same time that it points to variations in Winnipeg’s response to the war, it also permits some general observations about the character of the war on the home front.”
—Perrun, J. (2014) The Patriotic Consensus. University of Manitoba Press, 215.
“While greater liberty, power sharing, and unity did prevail aboard pirate ships … these were piratical means, used to secure cooperation within pirates’ criminal organization, rather than piratical ends, as they are often depicted … most sailors who became pirates did so for a more familiar reason: money.”
—Leeson, P. (2009). The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Accessed April 1, 2020. doi:10.2307/j.ctt7t3fh, 11.
“Any good science fiction … estrange[s] readers from their assumptions about the past, present, and future of their own world.”
—Yaszek, L. (2006). Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future. Socialism and Democracy: Socialism and Social Critique in Science Fiction, 20(3), 54. 
“In the context of digital media and learning, video games offer two overlapping opportunities. In one, players can learn about aspects of the world that particular games model, such as consumption in Animal Crossing or urban planning in Sim City. This is a kind of subject-centered literacy focused on examples of human practice. In the other, players can learn about procedurality itself, an inscriptive practice that will become more important only as computers continue to expand their role in society.”
—Bogost, I. (2018). The Rhetoric of Video Games. In V. Leitch et al. (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (3rd ed., p. 2660). W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 
Are we there yet? Inclusion:
“Inclusion also does a very great deal to avoid questions about the language of curriculum delivery and assessment. It is entirely to blame for the need to dissipate specific expertise (including linguistic skills) that was previously available through special schools to potentially each and every mainstream school in the country – an outcome that cannot be attained despite the most effective attempts to approach the problem via professional development training and collaborative working. … The educational sign language interpreter is a crutch to deaf pupils’ learning. Moreover, [they are] a crutch that serves to make inaccessible a deeper analysis of the conditions of social exclusion by making interpreting practice appear effective.”
—Thoutenhoofd, E. (2005). The Sign Language Interpreter in Inclusive Education. Translator, 11(2), 237–258.
“When one person is oppressed, no one is free. When one student is not a full participant in [their] school community, then we are all at risk. By embracing inclusion as a model of social justice, we can create a world fit for us all.”
—Sapon-Shevin, M. (2003). Inclusion: A matter of social justice. Educational Leadership, 61(2), 25–28.
“Free your mind and the rest will follow”:
“When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future”
—Tuck, E. and K. W. Yang. (2021). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 3. 
“It is only when I look through this lens that I am able to understand how it is that my grandmother would be so shaken to her core at the prospect of my mother joining her family. It was conditioned into her and those before and after as thoroughly as the words to ‘O Canada.’”
—Good, M. (2018). A Tradition of Violence: Stereotyping and Indigenous Women. In K. Anderson, M. Campbell, & C. Belcourt (Eds.), Keetsahnak: Our missing and murdered Indigenous Sisters (p. 100). The University of Alberta Press. 
Tuck and Yang explain various “settler moves to innocence.” As educators we are particularly susceptible to the fourth: “free your mind and the rest will follow.” They: “agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism.”
— Tuck, E. and K. W. Yang. (2021). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 19. 
Teaching Myself, a Teacher, to Teach:
“Something fundamental has gone wrong with testing in schools. In recent decades, a sprawling, suffocating—and highly profitable—apparatus of standardized testing has replaced teacher-designed assessment with a “data-driven” mania that is the engine of test-and-punish reform. … Like weeds in a garden, the spread of testing is strangling the curriculum, narrowing the range of what is taught, and impoverishing school experience. Children who need music, art, play, and poetry are instead getting worksheets and test prep. Students who need to critically explore gender, climate, and race issues are being taught to dissect multiple-choice questions. Active learning that helps students find meaning and purpose in their education is being replaced by standardized, scripted curriculum.”
—Karp, S. (2019). Time to get off the testing train. In L. Christensen, S. Karp, B. Peterson, & M. Yonamine (Eds.), The new teacher book: Finding purpose, balance, and hope during your first years in the classroom (pp. 207–208). Rethinking Schools.
I align my practice with critical sociocultural theories of teaching, which “focus not merely on the teacher or on the student, but rather on creating social activities or communities in which students acquire various practices and tools that they can bring to bear on their explorations of a wide range of literature, as well as on the broader contexts and communities within which students live and learn” (Beach et al., 2016). By nurturing these classroom communities and incorporating critical theory into my teaching, I can guide students to become aware of the power and privilege in the world around them, and to being able to “critique their own society intelligently and without fear” (Appleman, 2015).
—Appleman, D. (2015). Chapter one: What we teach and why? Critical encounters in secondary English: Teaching literary theory to adolescents (pp. 1–15) (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press.
—Beach, R., Appleman, D., Fecho, B., & Simon, R. (2016). Chapter 1: Why teach literature? Teaching literature to adolescents (pp. 3–15) (3rd ed.). Routledge.
“The way in which social studies and humanities courses are taught in high schools is of particular interest, due to the nature of the information being presented; teachers have a very strong influence in how certain ideas, groups, cultures, and knowledges are portrayed in their classrooms. This portrayal can become the difference between a course that is challenging, enlightening, and fighting the status quo, or one that further stereotypes, silences, and misrepresents information.”
—Rogers, P. (2011). Problematizing social studies curricula in Nova Scotia, 143.
“Classrooms can be places of hope, where students and teachers gain glimpses of the kind of society we could live in and where students learn the academic and critical skills needed to make that a reality”
—Christensen, L., Karp, S., Peterson, B., & Yonamine, M. (Eds.) (2019). The new teacher book: Finding purpose, balance, and hope during your first years in the classroom (3rd ed.). Rethinking Schools.
Fortuitous Encounters with Fabulous Fiction:
“‘No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,’ his father said”
—Herbert, F. (2010). Dune. ACE, 445.
“Among the people rising from these graves to heaven, Champion-Jeremiah tried to spot one Indian person but could not … Hell looked more engaging … At the end of the seven tributaries were dank-looking flame-lined caves where dark-skinned people sat. Aha! This is where the Indians are, thought Champion-Jeremiah, relieved that they were accounted for on this great chart … There appeared to be no end to the imagination with which these brown people took their pleasure; and this, Father Lafleur explained earnestly to his captive audience, was permanent punishment. Champion-Jeremiah was hoping to find an accordion player in at least one cave but, to his great disappointment, there was no place for musicians of his ilk in hell or heaven.”
—Highway, T. (2005). Kiss of the Fur Queen. Anchor Canada, 59–61, emphasis mine.
“‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.’”
—Tolkien, J. R. R. (1991). The Lord of the Rings. HarperCollinsPublishers, 64
Artist Statement
As a voracious reader, I believe in this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, although it is apocryphal: “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” Nevertheless, I do try to remember. I am a collector and curator—a digital hoarder of “just in case” pedagogical tools, ideas, references, and resources that I might, one day, need to draw on in my teaching practice. I always had the inclination to squirrel away things that might be useful, but I began this practice with more intention after taking ENGL 355:10 Restoration & 18th-Century Plays & Prose in 2019, at St. Francis Xavier University. One assignment was to maintain a commonplace book collecting quotes from the plays we studied, including musings on the scenes and ideas for staging and performance—a formative exercise building towards our summative assessment.
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I continued this practice throughout my university career. However, my compilation of knowledge did not reside in one single commonplace book, but rather in the digital realm of note-taking apps and down the rabbit hole of folders within folders ad nauseam. The practice of maintaining commonplace books can transform blank pages and digital data alike into:
many collections of ‘items’ that forecast individualism in their decidedly personal ownership of intertextuality. Like any collation of memorable language, they are always poised for projection into arrangements that will assert a keeper’s personal participation, to become another story, a constructed reality of “original” contributions from self-sponsored acquisitions (Miller, 1998, p. 48).
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The commonplace book practice, with its Eurocentric and colonial heritage, is simply a practice that works for me. I do not think it is inherently inferior or superior to any other way of compiling knowledge. It merely aligns with my nature as a gluttonous reader, a compiler and hoarder of what might have pedagogical value.
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I concur with Miller’s assertion that commonplace books can “circulate a magnificent self-pedagogy” (1998, p. 50). They are a tool that can be used independently of the traditional institutionalized education system. Commonplace books in the European Renaissance were used not only by those formally educated students and instructors, but by anyone who wanted to be, or appear to be, educated:
They became populist repositories, material aids to memory in which a single but infinitely divisible image could stand for an entire textual structure shared by the many keepers of such books, inside and outside the elite educational tradition. This form of populist textual character building was a vital element in Renaissance humanist education, an emblem of the humanists’ promotion of more democratic attitudes (Miller, 1998, p. 24).
For me, my commonplace practice exists in a liminal space. It resides between the public, elite education sphere, where I have spent much time formally reading for work and study, and my humble private sphere, where I read informally for pleasure and personal curiosity.
With my background in Medieval Studies, I also recognize the connection of commonplace books to the practice of creating a florilegium, a collection of excerpts from other writings, to build and mold one’s character (Miller, 1998, p. 23). One of the most popular florilegia, the Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum, was:
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a tool, a reference book, carefully compiled for practical purposes. … intended … primarily as a device to assist preachers in the preparation of sermons. But with any effective tool, whether florilegium or claw-hammer, the scope of its utility is determined by the needs of its users rather than by the intent of its creator. Besides the preachers, the Manipulus florum was seized upon by a host of others—florilegists, theologians, mystics, lawyers, vernacular poets—who mined it for authorities with which to shore up the arguments or enliven the language of their various works … Thomas of Ireland’s collection of extracts was used, repeatedly, in the compilation of other collections of extracts. Some of these florilegia were private or personal collections, informal in structure, intended solely for the use of the compiler. Others were public works, that is, works of a formal nature, complete within their own terms of reference, intended to be used by, and designed so as to be usable for, persons other than the compiler. The Manipulus florum was mined for both types of collection, the notebook and the finished work (Rouse & Rouse, 1979, p. 188, 197).
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My own florilegia model this tradition, containing not only selections from primary sources, but selections from selections: bits and pieces from academic anthologies and collections. My use case is certainly not the original—I do not preach sermons and pontificate. However, as an educator, I use the practice like theologians, lawyers, vernacular poets: to shore up and enliven my pedagogy and practice.
Drawing on my collections, for tools, ideas, references, and resources, is a central part of my pedagogy. It furnishes my teaching practice with adaptability, flexibility, and the ability to meet student needs with a variety of resources and approaches. I can dig through my collections, my toolbox, to find something which will work. It academically supports my pedagogy and my students. Miller argues that “commonplace texts process education as a relationship among people, not as visions of superior lessons. Education thus preserves an unstable subjectivity that is partially anchored by acquiring and deploying, digesting and recirculating, commonplace cultural goods” (1998, p. 141, emphasis in original). My pedagogy is based on reciprocal relationships where both teacher and students share and learn to critically digest cultural goods. I am glad to have my commonplace books and collected florilegia as a reservoir to drawn on and add to, as I teach, and learn from, my students.
References: Rouse, & Rouse, M. A. (1979). Preachers, florilegia and sermons studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Miller, S. (1998). Assuming the positions: Cultural pedagogy and the politics of commonplace writing. University of Pittsburgh Press.